7 Steps to Creating a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

7 Steps to Creating a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is about sharing your brand or company’s story in a way that feels more authentic and useful to the consumer.

For a good content marketing definition, consider the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) version, which references it as a “strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

A successful content strategy is important because it can help you accomplish key objectives and goals for your business, including:

  • Increased brand awareness, retention, and loyalty.
  • Lead generation.
  • Connection with your audience.
  • Higher traffic, sales, and intended consumer action.
  • Thought leadership to build credibility and influence.
  • Introduction of corporate social responsibility goals.
  • Amplification of other marketing tactics, including SEO, PR, and social media.

7 Steps to Content Marketing Strategy Success

The seven steps below provide a guide to creating a successful business content marketing strategy. 

1. Set Your Goals

Before you even pass go, the first step in developing a content marketing strategy is to clarify your goals. Defining the purpose behind your content marketing strategy will help establish your roadmap for moving forward.

Examples of goals include:

  • Establish thought leadership.
  • Increase traffic to your website from search engines.
  • Improve customer retention.
  • Generate an increase in product sales.
  • Drive more lead generation to a free downloadable asset.

It’s helpful to be as specific as possible with goals and include measurable targets so you can assess the effectiveness of your content strategy and make any necessary changes.

2. Define Your Audience

After you establish the goal you want to achieve, it’s time to define your target audience. Knowing who you want to reach is imperative to an effective content marketing strategy — the best content in the world will mean nothing if it’s not relevant and actionable for the consumer.

It’s helpful to create brand personas—or personas—for your best-fit prospects and customers. These personas should include standard demographic data like age, gender, location, income, and more. 

You may also want to consider qualifications like:

  • What are their key motivators, beliefs, and values?
  • What are their pain points or challenges?
  • How can your products or services help solve those challenges?
  • How and where do they consume content?
  • What types of content do they enjoy most?

3. Do Your Research

There are several types of research you’ll want to consider for an effective content marketing strategy. 

First, look at what your competition in the marketplace is doing. Explore the types of content they’re producing and how it is performing with consumers. You might be able to get some ideas to make your own as you think about what will resonate best with your goals and your target audiences.

You’ll also want to investigate what your audience is already searching for online. Keyword research through a tool like Semrush can be helpful in compiling the most popular keywords that people are searching for on Google and other search engines. These results will help guide your content strategy and perhaps even give you some new ideas.

Finally, you might consider researching and reviewing any existing content you’ve already generated. What has generated the most interest? What hasn’t performed well? Use this information to inform your content strategy, too.

4. Choose Your Content Types and Content Pillars

Using your goals, target audience, and research findings, you’ll now want to select the types of content that will be most effective.

Popular content marketing examples to consider include:

  • Short-form videos
  • Static images
  • Tutorials
  • Blogs
  • Podcasts
  • White papers and e-books
  • Infographics

From here, you can establish some overarching content pillars or themes to guide your strategy. For example, you may choose to focus on a different topic every month while integrating special promotions and acknowledging more general-interest content like national holidays.

5. Create a Content Calendar

Once you have created your content pillars and topics, it’s time to make a plan. 

A content marketing strategy template or a content calendar helps you organize, coordinate, execute, and track your content strategy. Otherwise, it’s very easy to lose track of your publishing schedule.

There are many ways you can create a content calendar — from basic programs to more advanced solutions. You can use something as straightforward (and free) as Google Sheets or WordPress Editorial Calendar — or more advanced tools like Trello, Asana, or Basecamp.

All content calendars will likely include details like topic and title, type, graphics, owner, status, due date, and publish date. This helps keep everyone involved in your content strategy informed and on track.

6. Publish and Promote Your Content

With your content calendar in hand, it’s time to go “live” and begin publishing your content. But it doesn’t end there.

It’s essential to make sure your content reaches as many people as possible in your target audience. Therefore, your content marketing strategy should include a plan for amplification, too.

Here are a few ways you can promote your content after you’ve published it:

  • Social Media: Share your content on your social media platforms. Consider boosting your posts to reach more people.
  • Email Marketing: Message your email lists with engaging calls to action.
  • Paid Advertising: From PPC to Google ads, Meta advertising solutions, and more, paid ads are often an investment worth making.
  • Influencer Partnerships: Consider building relationships with relevant influencers to reach new audiences that are appropriate for your brand.
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Make sure your content is optimized effectively to rank higher in search results.

7. Monitor Performance

An effective content marketing strategy is constantly being monitored, tracked, and evaluated. It also will likely evolve over time as you learn what types of content are making the biggest impact toward your goals.

The specific metrics you track may differ depending on your goals. Google Analytics is a widely used platform to measure website traffic and engagement. Social media analytics tools — like Meta for Business — are also effective for measuring social media reach and engagement.

Bonus Step: Plan Your Resources

Developing a content marketing strategy — and executing it — requires significant time and expertise. You may feel like you don’t have the adequate resources or time to make it happen. Many companies look to outside resources to support their content marketing.

Denver Post Media’s award-winning solutions in the content space allow us to serve your needs for all things content. Whether you’re looking for placement and promotion or development and strategy, we’re here to help connect your brand to engaged audiences through the unique format of storytelling. We can help you tell your story. Learn more here.

6 Key Metrics Every Business Should Track

6 Key Metrics Every Business Should Track

Key Marketing Metrics Every Business Should Track

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” – Peter Drucker

Management consultant Peter Drucker’s frequently referenced business principle reinforces the importance of measuring data points to manage and improve business processes.

Tracking quantifiable metrics helps reflect the successes — or challenges — of marketing tactics to achieve KPIs for business. 

While it can be easy to interchange KPIs (key performance indicators) and metrics, the distinction is that KPIs are tied to specific business goals and objectives. Metrics are neutral data points that, in context, can be used to evaluate progress toward those goals and objectives. 

Benefits of Tracking Marketing Metrics

We’d be willing to guess that at least one of your business goals is generating more revenue or increasing value in some form or fashion. Your marketing campaigns and sales efforts should have a positive impact on your company’s KPIs and bottom line. But, without tracking marketing metrics, there’s no way to tangibly quantify your results.

Here are just a few benefits of marketing metrics:

  • Assess your company’s performance.
  • Compare your performance against industry benchmarks and your company’s prior performance.
  • Identify any challenges to course-correct.
  • Pinpoint campaign pain points.
  • Evaluate KPIs and set future goals.
  • Provide your stakeholders with important insights.

6 Metrics Marketing Teams Should Track

With a sea of available data points available, you may be wondering what to track — especially for online businesses. After all, there are so many ways for companies to market and advertise their product or service — from online advertising to email, direct mail, email, social media, and more — it’s essential to know what is performing well and what marketing mix is most effective. 

Start with these six essential metrics, many of which can be built into your Google Analytics KPIs dashboard: 

1. Users and Sessions

While it may seem quite rudimentary to track users and sessions in Google Analytics in addition to the percentage of new users versus returning users, this data can paint an important baseline picture of how many people are visiting your site and any of your relevant landing pages—and, in turn, tell you how your SEO and marketing KPIs are performing. 

2. User Acquisition

Although not technically a metric, another report you’ll want to pay attention to is how your visitors found your site or landing page. That’s precisely what user acquisition will tell you. This is especially vital if you’re using a range of different marketing platforms and campaigns and you want to know what’s performing the best — or, conversely, what seems to be driving the least traffic. Google Analytics’s report shows metrics like new users, engaged users, and event counts.

3. Key Event Rate

Google Analytics tracks all actions as “events,” and then you get to decide what is a “key event,” which you can use to get an idea of your customer conversion rate. Conversion rate measures the percentage of your audience who convert by completing your desired action, such as downloading a white paper, purchasing a product, or starting a free trial.

You can manually calculate key events like conversion rates using the following formulas:

  • Conversion Rate = Conversions / Sessions
  • User Conversion Rate = Users Who Converted / Total Users   

4. Customer Acquisition 

Do you know how much it costs to turn a prospect into a customer? Customer acquisition cost (CAC) can tell you. It’s essential to know your CAC because if your investment in acquiring new customers continually exceeds your revenue, your business will be upside-down.

To calculate your CAC, a formula you can use is:

  • CAC = total marketing and sales spend / number of new customers

5. Customer Lifetime Value

While it’s important to know your CAC, it’s even more critical to know what a customer is worth to your business. That’s where Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) comes in, as it shows how much revenue a customer generates during the relationship with your company. The best way to calculate this metric is not by individual customers, but by an average of all typical customers.

To calculate your CLV, a formula you can use is:

  • CLV = (Average transaction value x Average number of transactions in a year x Average customer retention in years) x Profit margin

6. Return on Marketing Investment

In addition to CLV and CAC, there’s one more acronym that can help give you a clear vantage point on your marketing’s effectiveness as it relates to your bottom line. ROMI (return on marketing investment) measures how much revenue your marketing campaign is generating compared to the cost of running that campaign. 

Basically, ROMI can tell you if your marketing efforts are paying off — or not.

To calculate your ROMI, a formula you can use is:

  • ROMI = (sales growth – marketing cost) / marketing cost 

Your Partner to Help You Manage and Measure

At Denver Post Media, we know it can be overwhelming to measure and track these metrics and to understand how and when to pull the appropriate levers to create successful improvement in your marketing strategies and campaigns.

That’s why we do it for you — from content marketing to paid search, email, display, social, mobile, video, and more — all with a customized approach that includes advanced reporting.

Contact us today, and let’s start the conversation!